Ecoart Roots: Is Ecoart new? Where did it come from?
Ecoart practice is relatively “new,” art historically—about three decades in development and evolving rapidly. But its philosophical roots reach back in the western tradition to Aristotle at least. Scroll to the end for citations of some key documentation and analysis of the ecoart phenomenon, its precedents and evolving contexts.
The rapidly developing current practice of ecoart springs from, and combines, aspects of three main contemporary art movements: environmental art, activist art and community engagement or “animation” art, all of which emerged in the US at roughly the same time. Ecoart has found a fertile matrix where these movements overlap; where a progressive art “in the public interest” emerges that stresses community involvement, the elevation of process over product and a vision of art as a path toward participatory democracy.
Ecoart as defined by SFEAP features aspects of the various kinds of environmental art that have evolved over several decades. Environmental art is perceived today by most commentators as an umbrella category, encompassing a wide variety of practices. The practice is worldwide and highly diverse in thematics and methods. See Heike Strelow, Natural Reality: Artistic Positions between Nature and Culture and www.greenmuseum.org for strong examples of practitioners from Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia and Australia/New Zealand, as well as the US.
The beginnings of environmental art have been traced to the 1960s’ questioning of all societal forms, including the norm of exhibiting “art” in an “artistic” venue (commercial gallery or museum).
Primary examples of pioneering environmental art practice that moved out of the “white cube” gallery and museum space would include Robert Smithson’s “earth” or “land” art like Spiral Jetty (1970)
Click image to enlarge
and Christo’s Surrounded Islands (1982)
Click image to enlarge
located outside the gallery, in provocative locations like the Great Salt Lake in Utah and Florida’s Biscayne Bay. Newton and Helen Harrison’sSurvival Piece: Portable Orchard (1972)
Click image to enlarge
moved in the other direction, converting indoor art spaces into places where one could experience natural plant growth directly, and become aware of how divorced most urban dwellers are from the natural processes of farming that feed us.
By 2002, co-curators Amy Lipton and Sue Spaid produced the landmark exhibition Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologiesat the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. The curators sought to showcase actions they dubbed ecoventions to distinguish them from Earthworks, man-made incursions on typically-vast land areas largely uninhabited by people; environmental art, nature employed as art’s medium; or eco-art works that document or highlight threatened ecosystems. Ecovention mostly featured recent works, plus Jackie Brookner’s Laughing Brook, whichis nearly completed six years later. To accompany the exhibition’s current and historical content, twelve artists produced site-specific ecoventions in and around the Cincinnati area. Lipton and Spaid consider collaborative ecoventions indicative of artists’ intentions to curtail man-made obstacles, rather than to discuss or neglect them as past artists have, or to remedy specific problems as scientists must. According to Spaid and Lipton, such artists’ actions resolve ecological situations either by publicizing/ monitoring/rethinking problematic conditions or by engaging direct and/or indirect ameliorable/restorative practices.
This exhibition’s catalog Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies, written by Sue Spaid, was co–published by the Contemporary Arts Center, ecoartspace and greenmuseum.org. The Ecoventions catalogue is available in its entirety online.
Examples of works considered “ecoventions” and included in the show were:
Jackie Brookner’s biosculptures that utilize certain kinds of particularly hardy mosses and other plants to clean water of heavy metals, phosphorus, nitrogen and other pollutants found in stormwater and agricultural runoff;
Click image to enlarge
and AMD&Art (Acid Mine Drainage and Art), a nearly decade-long “ecovention” that transformed a closed down coal mining site in Western Pennsylvania where acidic water had, for years, been coating plant life with an orange ooze known as acid-mine drainage. The project, complex in the extreme
Before AMD & Art
After AMD & Art
Click image to enlarge
Click image to enlarge
was a vast collaboration between four principals (an industrial historian, a landscape architect, a sculptor and a hydrologist); fourteen funding partners, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Office of Surface Mining, U.S. Forest Service, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Rural Arts Alliance; and hundreds of volunteers, including local citizens, Americorps and VISTA volunteers. The work is still evolving with three projects completed, and others in several stages of development.
“Ecovention” artists involved with South Florida, while not resident here include: Jackie Brookner and Angelo Ciotti (who specializes in reclamation of “dirty dirt” into large land sculptures) created Elders’ Cove in West Palm Beach, FL the first permanent ecoart project in South Florida. The Brookner-Ciotti ecoart piece (Elders’ Cove) in West Palm Beach’s Dreher Park is currently in restoration.
SFEAP plans to tap experienced ecoartists’ expertise (among others’) for SFEAP-partnered long term ecoart residencies in which local South Florida resident professional artists will work in an apprenticeship relationship with them. The first such project was launched April 2, 2009, is a collaboration by SFEAP, Inc. and the Arts Council of Martin County and is in development as a community ecoart education and artist apprenticeship model that SFEAP plans to initiate in all 5 watersheds of South Florida.
Ecoart's roots in activist art practice have also evolved over time, and can be traced to the '60s. Many artists claim the “activist” designation for work ranging from the strongly transgressive that tweaks conventional notions of what “art” is, or whose content is aimed at shocking or stunning viewers; to highly didactic forms used in direct action political events.
Bread and Puppet Theater founded in 1962, and continuing in the present, became a fixture of anti-Vietnam War protests and is an early example of direct action activist art. The more “transgressive” type includes many of the works attacked by the religious right wing during the so-called “Culture Wars” of the early 1990s. The work of the “NEA four” -- Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes-- are prime examples of “transgressive” activist art. The four performance artists addressed, in a most confrontational manner, harsh subject matter such as violence against women and AIDS, in the late 1980s. Their National Endowment for the Arts funding was canceled in 1990 because of right wing lobbying which resulted in Supreme Court action, and led, unfortunately, to the cancellation of NEA’s individual artist grants.
An important example of activist art that continues to the present is the Guerrilla Girls, the self-described “conscience of the art world.” As the group describes their origins: “In 1985, The Museum of Modern Art in New York opened an exhibition titled An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. It was supposed to be an up-to-the minute summary of the most significant contemporary art in the world. Out of 169 artists, only 13 were women. All the artists were white, either from Europe or the US. That was bad enough, but the curator, Kynaston McShine, said any artist who wasn't in the show should rethink ‘his’ career. And that really annoyed a lot of artists because obviously the guy was completely prejudiced. Women demonstrated in front of the museum with the usual placards and picket line. Some of us who attended were irritated that we didn't make any impression on passersby.” From these beginnings as self-appointed affirmative action-ists for women artists, the GGs have moved on to address all kinds of discrimination and injustice inside and outside the art world with acerbic humor and striking graphics wielded in a “guerrilla format” as well as, now, in infiltration of major art venues such as the Venice Biennale in 2006.
A very central book, still a touchstone in defining activist art practice more than a decade after its publication, is the 1995 anthology edited by pioneering activist artist Suzanne Lacy: Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, which documents and champions a strain of activist art that eschews “rant” and embraces dialogue. Ecoart draws liberally from this tradition.
Ecoart, as SFEAP is defining it, is “activist” in that it engages the public, primarily outside traditional art venues (but also in them), and often in ways that attract media attention; and seeks to bring the “hidden” sources of environmental degradation out into the open. Ecoart often allies itself with the agendas and programs of environmental advocacy and activist organizations, both directly and indirectly.
As defined by the founders of the Community Arts Network, and primary spokespersons for the field, Linda Burnham and Steven Durland, community arts are practiced across a very broad spectrum, “… from the narrowest view of community art as art for social change (activist art that intends to cure social ills) to the broadest view that includes public art (art installed outdoors that intersects with daily community life) and public arts policy (from arts funding to political involvement).”
SFEAP would expand on this definition by adding the terms “engagement” and “animation” in order to stress the active participation by the public in all phases of the development and implementation of the strategies ecoart has borrowed from this movement.
Some examples of pioneering community arts projects developed in the US that emphasized “engagement” and “animation” would include:
Donna Henes, Flashlights, 1986-87, a grass-roots December celebration of light for rural Rosendale, New York, at the time, one of the many small, rural upstate New York communities suffering from decades-long economic deprivation. Flashlights mobilized youth to make 64 foot-wide snowflakes that were hung across downtown streets with webs composed of 6,000 lights—one for every Rosendale citizen, as a “festival of light during times of dark.” The following year, Rosendale brought Henes back to help develop their “light is hope” celebration in which local citizens, clad in Mylar costumes festooned with flashlights accompanied floats designed around the theme of light, peace and community spirit. The town continues a celebration of lights early each December.
John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), 1985-present. Los Angeles Poverty Department was founded in 1985 by director, actor, activist, and writer John Malpede. At its inception, LAPD was the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people. LAPD is still, after more than 20 years, dedicated to building community on Skid Row, Los Angeles. Since 1985, the company has offered performance workshops that are free and open to the Skid Row community— partnering with numerous social service and advocacy groups.
Suzanne Lacy, Auto on the Edge of Time, 1993-1995 Working on the theme of battered women, Lacy engaged her usual modus operandi of inviting those whose experiences are central to the work to help create it, including finding the metaphor that gives the theme its power, in this case, the wrecked car, whose scraped paint, dents and broken glass stand in for the battered woman’s body.
The work ultimately moved and was performed in 4 locations around the US, each time changing as the stories of the women (and their children) in the new locale were added, sometimes on the car that traveled, sometimes on additional wrecked cars. The abuse stories were inscribed everywhere, inside and outside of the cars, in paint, magic marker or etched on the broken windows.
Part of the outdoor installation in each city, usually in an abandoned gas station, was a telephone booth where viewers could listen to stories in women’s own voices, record their stories, or phone a battered women’s shelter. In each location, extensive media was generated, and in one case, new anti-domestic violence legislation which had been tabled was voted upon favorably as a direct result of the presence of the piece.
Rick Lowe, Project Rowhouses, 1993-present. This project, keying off a series of 21 aging “shotgun” type row houses in a historically blue collar African American neighborhood of Houston, Texas, the “Third Ward,” was initially conceived to be a place where African American artists could honor the work of artist John Biggers known for his colorful depictions of this very kind of house. Now entering its 15th year, Project Row Houses has become much more than any of the young artists could have imagined when they got permission to create art in one of the abandoned houses in 1993. According to their website, Project Row Houses, now an official 501-c-3 nonprofit has “renovated the initial site of 2500 Holman Street and the twenty-two shotgun houses that sit upon it. Ten of the twenty-two row houses are dedicated to art, photography, and literary projects, which are installed on a rotating six-month basis. When a group of artists is commissioned, each is given a house to transform in ways that speak to the history and cultural issues relevant to the African-American community. Located in seven houses adjacent to those dedicated to art, The Young Mothers Residential Program provides transitional housing and services for young mothers and their children.” The Project has also formed a Community Development Corporation to fight off gentrification of the area.
Daniel J. Martinez’, Consequences of a Gesture, 1993, was one of the events organized as part of Culture in Action in Chicago an ambitious series of public projects aimed at a radical redefinition of “public art.” One of the Culture in Action events was a parade developed by Martinez and others with the participation of 35 community organizations and 1000 Mexican Americans and African Americans, infants to the elderly. The project took two years to develop. The parade went through several ethnically quite different areas of Chicago, a city known for inter-ethnic rivalries and hostilities; and became a touchstone for Chicago community organizers. For information on more recent Martinez work, see www.stretcher.org.
The best Ecoart projects are fundamentally community mobilization and animation projects. SFEAP will strongly emphasize this vital element in all new ecoart projects in which it is a partner. The important promise of ecoart cannot be accomplished by raising awareness alone. Building community to steward the environment will be crucial to the deep cultural changes necessary to enhance the chances of the planet’s survival—and our own.
During SFEAP’s research, prior to launch in early 2007, two South Florida-resident artists were identified whose practices have strong ecoart elements: Michael Singer and Xavier Cortada. We also discovered there was one permanent ecoart project in South Florida, in West Palm Beach’s Dreher Park, that city’s largest public green space. The artists who created this first permanent ecoart work in South Florida, Jackie Brookner and Angelo Ciotti do not live in South Florida.
Neither does Lorna Jordan, a well-known public artist from Seattle with experience in environmental art projects that include aspects of ecoart. Jordan completed (in 2006) a commissioned master plan for public art for Broward County’s parks and natural areas that appears to have ecoart potential.
Most recently, in April of 2009, the first community ecoart education and artist apprenticeship program, developed by SFEAP, and fielded in collaboration with the Arts Council of Martin County was launched. The project was funded for two years by the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin Counties. Click HERE for a full description of the project.
Michael Singer is an award-winning artist-designer who has made major ecologically powerful contributions to urban infrastructure with such projects as the Solid Waste Transfer and Recyling Center, 1989-1993, Phoenix AZ which the New York Times designated in 1993 as one of the 8 most important architectural events of the year. Here in South Florida, Singer is currently the chief designer for the renovation of the West Palm Beach waterfront, and produced a strongly “green” design for Howard Park, an important park located at the gateway to the city, carrying out key stormwater retention and treatment elements.
Singer resides in Delray Beach, Palm Beach County, November thru June and Vermont, July through October. He is Distinguished Artist in Residence at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, and a key advisor to the South Florida Environmental Art Project.
Xavier Cortada is a Miami based Cuban-American artist, attorney, and activist who has worked for over a decade, collaboratively, with diverse groups across the United States, Latin America, Europe and Africa to create pro-social community murals and participant-driven art projects. His web site displays some of his artwork and contains information on the various projects in which he has been involved. His public transformation into an ecoartist began with his community engagement/ecoart intervention The Reclamation Project in 2005.
The recent essay by Mary Jo Aagerstoun, Founder of SFEAP, in the
catalogue for The Reclamation Project, adopted by, and exhibited at the
Miami Science Museum, December 2007, explains the artist’s “greening.” Click to read the essay in its entirety. Cortada is a member of SFEAP's Board of Directors, and is a frequent collaborator with, SFEAP on a number of new ecoart project explorations.
The Friends of Elders’ Cove was organized by SFEAP in September, 2007, to restore, with private sector funds and volunteer labor, the first permanent ecoart project in South Florida, designed by internationally renowned ecoartists Jackie Brookner and Angelo Ciotti, and selected, in 2005 by Americans for the Arts as one of the “Best Public Art” projects of the year. Damaged by a combination of hurricane winds shortly after it was completed in 2004, and by several years thereafter of inappropriate and inadequate maintenance, the work was inoperative when it was “discovered” during the research preceding the launch of SFEAP in early 2007. It had languished unrecognized for its pioneering role in the history of ecoart in South Florida.
The ecoart design underscores the flood control and stormwater retention and cleansing function
Click image to enlarge
of the string of natural and human-devised lakes that run down the center of 103-acre Dreher Park,
Click image to enlarge
West Palm Beach’s largest green space. The park also serves as a passive public park and home for two of the city’s principal cultural/scientific educational organizations, the Palm Beach Zoo and the South Florida Science Museum. Another key aspect of the original ecoart design for Dreher Park was to celebrate the history of the site which, up to about 60 years ago, was one of the trading posts for the Seminoles who would paddle up through the chain of lakes now in Dreher Park, from the Everglades, to trade.
Click image to enlarge
Click image to enlarge
The Friends of Elders’ Cove represents among its membership neighborhood associations of citizens living next to the park, environmental advocacy organizations, cultural groups, the Parks and Recreation Department and other municipal and county organizations. The group was one of 18 recipients nationwide of a $10,000 Keep America Beautiful, Inc. THINK GREEN grant which will help to jumpstart our efforts. The group will repair the biosculpture fountain, replanting its surfaces with water cleaning plants;
Click image to enlarge
clean up and replant the water-cleaning wetland plantings around the edges of the lakes, and restore the cypress island, all of which were key aspects of the original ecoart design. And the establishment of the Friends of Elders’ Cove also carries forward a key element of ecoart…engagement of community.
PRINT AND ELECTRONIC RESEARCH RESOURCES CONSULTED RE: ENVIRONMENTAL ART MOVEMENT WORLDWIDE
The most important resource currently for determining the contours of the worldwide environmental art movement is an electronic one www.greenmuseum.org. As of June, 2007, the site contained information on over 100 artists from 16 countries. The largest number are from the US (64), followed by countries of the European Union (Germany, the UK, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands—23), Canada next with 5, Japan with 3, and New Zealand, Mexico, Iran, South Africa, Israel and Argentina with 1 each.
This is, of course, not a complete picture of all artists working in environmentally engaged practices. Greenmuseum.org is a curated website, and does not seek to represent every artist who believes s/he is pursuing an environmental art practice. Every attempt was made during the research for the SFEAP Feasibility and Market Assessment to find as many sources as possible in order to determine some general characteristics of the movement worldwide.
Textual resources utilized in this area of research unearthed a few more non-US resident (or origin) artists, although documenting numbers of such artists was not the purpose of these texts. These textual resources included the following books and exhibition catalogues:
Kagan, Sacha and Volker Kirchberg (eds.). Sustainability: A New Frontier for the Arts and Cultures. Frankfurt/Main: VAS, 2008.
Matilsky, Barbara C. (exh. cat.) Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists' Interpretations and Solutions. New York: Rizzoli, in association with the Queens Museum of Art, 1992.
Spaid, Sue. Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies. Cincinnati: The Contemporary Arts Center, 2002. Also online at http://greenmuseum.org/c/ecovention/
Strelow, Heike. (exh. cat.) Natural Reality: Artistic Positions between Nature and Culture. Aachen, Germany Ludwig Forum for International Art: 1999.
____ (ed.) Ecological Aesthetics: Art in Environmental Design--Theory and Practice. Basel, Berlin, Boston: Birkhauser, 2004.
Sources on ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES IN SOUTH FLORIDA
Anon. 9-14-2004. “Crews testing ocean for possible contamination.” Palm Beach Post.
Baro-Diaz, Madeline (Miami Bureau). 3-1-2005. “Coalition Fights for Buffer Line; Oppose Moving Housing Boundary.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Barton, Antigone. 6-7-2007. “Reef’s continued downfall dismays divers, scientists.” Palm Beach Post.
Belleville, Bill. Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape.Tampa: The University Press of Florida, 2006.
Bolivar, Lisa. 5-27-2007. “Delray to become greener.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Clewell, A. F. 2000. “Restoring for Natural Authenticity.” Ecological Restoration 18 (Winter): 216-217.
Davis, Jack E. Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida. Tampa: University Press of Florida, 2005.
Editorial. 7-10-2007. “Year-round water limits must become new norm.” Palm Beach Post.
Editorial. 7-14-2007. “Florida Joins the ‘Green’ Movement.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Editorial. 6-21-2007. “Environment Issue: Environmentalists fight Lake Worth’s plan for desalination plant.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Editorial. 9-28-2006. “Environment Issue: Everglades cleanup in trouble.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Editorial. 8-22-2005. “Environment Issue: New report from NOAA looks at deteriorating coral reefs.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Eltman, Frank. 7-14-2007.“The grass is getting greener: organic lawn care a popular way to avoid pesticides, chemicals.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Fleshler, David. 7-1-2007. “Everglades National Park removed from danger list.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
____. 7-3-2007. “Better way to save the reef.” Palm Beach Post.
____. 3-2-2005. “Sugar Executive Gets Water Post; Polluter in Everglades.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Grunwald, Michael. February 24, 2004. “Water World.” The New Republic.
____. The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.
____. April 3, 2003. “Sugar Plum.” The New Republic.
____. June 15, 2005. “Swamp Thing.” Slate.
____. November 8, 2004. “Swamp Things.” The New Republic.
Guide to the Natural Communities of Florida. 1990. Tallahassee: Florida Natural Areas Inventory and Department of Natural Resources.
Harris, Rachel and Robert P. King. 8-18-2005. “Algae found toxic, but risks aren’t clear.” Palm Beach Post.
Janok, Nicole. 5-7-2007. “Fragile balance offshore.” Palm Beach Post.
King, Robert P. 7-23-2007. “Water Losing Fight vs. Growth.” Palm Beach Post.
____. 7-12-2007. “District deadlocked on pumping into lake.” Palm Beach Post.
____. 7-15-2006. “The Lake O Dike: 20 years of warnings.” Palm Beach Post.
Lantigua, John and Christine Stapleton. 425-2005. “Florida pesticide monitoring draws fire.” Palm Beach Post.
Lord, Linda A. Guide to Florida Environmental Issues and Information. Winter Park, FL: Florida Conservation Foundation, 1993.
McCally, David. The Everglades: An Environmental History.Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1998.
McCluney, Ross. The Environmental Destruction of South Florida; A Handbook for Citizens. Coral Gables, Fla: University of Miami Press, 1971.
National Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Restoration of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem. Adaptive monitoring & assessment for the comprehensive Everglades restoration plan. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003.
Reid, Andy. 1-18-2007. “Officials Leery of Sharing Water.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
____. 10-17-2005. “Living in the zone despite perennial threat of hurricanes.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
____. 7-10-2005. “Land can’t sustain demand; Officials warn of sprawl.” South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Santaniello, Neil. 1-5-2005. “Sugar Plant in Pahokee No. 1 Polluter.” South Florida Sun Sentinel. Simmonsen, Rachel. 6-25-2007. “Drought a welcome relief for Rivers.” Palm Beach Post.
____. 6-29-2007. “Crist signs off on ‘big deal’ for rivers, lake and Everglades.” Palm Beach Post.
Be sure to put "SFEAP" in the designation box on the "Donate" page (Designation (Optional) To designate your donation for a specific fund or purpose, please enter a description of how you'd like your donation to be used.
